Birth Parents Find Chinese Adoptee!

“There are two versions of Zoe Halbeisen’s adoption story.

The first is the one orphanage officials told her adoptive parents when they traveled to China to bring her home to Charlotte.

As aninfant girl, nine days old and wrapped in a blanket, Zoe was left in Changzhou, China on the steps outside a department store, abandoned by her birth parents, orphanage officials said.

She was discovered by the store’s employees, who took her to a nearby orphanage. News of her discovery made headlines, and those employees rallied around her, visiting often. Three years later she was adopted by Valli and Stephen Halbeisen.

Zoe, 23, grew up believing that story.

In the second version, Zoe was placed on the steps outside of a department store by her desperate father after a visit from Chinese government officials at his home in the city. They demanded he and his wife give up Zoe, their second child. The couple was in violation of the country’s one-child policy, officials told them. They could keep her only if they paid a steep fine, money they didn’t have.

The store wasn’t far from where her family lived. Her father intended to watch over her from a distance. To one day get her back. Three years later when he learned about her impending adoption, he begged orphanage staff to give her back. They refused, and his daughter, who they had named Long Chen, left the country with her adoptive family and became Zoe.

This spring Zoe’s birth parents, father Chen Xin Zhong and mother Wang Xu Mei found her. They had not stopped searching for 20 years.

It took her weeks to believe their claim she was their daughter, she said, and to wrap her mind around the reality — they’d never wanted to give her up.

Zoe’s home in the U.S. was in Charlotte, and she graduated from Grand Ledge High School in 2014. She never believed she’d meet her birth family. Connecting with them was impossible, she thought. Now she’s preparing to travel to China to meet them.

“I imagined they had left me there and walked away, but it’s so much more complex than that,” Zoe said. “Really, I wasn’t abandoned at all. They were there all along, this whole time.”

Zoe dismissed the first email she received from Lan and Brian Stuy’s nonprofit DNAConnect.Org as spam.

Sent in March, it encouraged her to contact them. They knew details about her birth parents in China, information she would want, it read.

From her home in New York City, where she’s been living for the last year and working as a software engineer, she doubted the email was legitimate.

“I know that the odds are just astronomical that it could be anything,” she said. “I just thought, spam, or they’re trying to scam me out of money, or something like that, but they kept contacting me.”

What Zoe didn’t realize was that the results of a DNA test she’d taken more than a year earlier — her effort to learn more about her medical history — were logged in a database. And it led her parents to her.

Zoe wrote to DNAConnect.Org, expecting to confirm her suspicions of a scam. The email she got back was lengthy and descriptive.

Brian Stuy is the Utah-based nonprofit’s founder. He and Lan have been collecting DNA from families in China since 2013.

They use it to connect families who were often forced or coerced into relinquishing their children because of China’s one-child policy. The policy was in place for decades before it ended in 2016. Most of the children impacted were adopted by foreign families, he said.

It’s very common for an adoptee to doubt any claims they make about birth families at first, Stuy said.

“The most common reaction is disbelief,” he said. “The adoptee won’t believe that we’ve located their birth family because they simply had been raised to believe that that was impossible.”

Sometimes it takes more than a genetic match to convince them, Lan said.

Often the story they know, that the orphanages tell their adoptive parents, is totally different than the truth,” she said. “I’m not sure these people know how bad the one-child policy was when they were born.”

Zoe said two letters, one each from her birth parents, made all the difference for her.

They outlined details no one but her birth parents could possibly know. Her birth father, Chen Xin Zhong wrote that her parents watched her from afar for three years while she was cared for at Changzhou Social Children’s Welfare Institute. When he and her two sisters moved out of the city, Wang Xu Mei stayed behind hoping Zoe would return.

Leaving Zoe on the steps outside Tian Long Department Store was the worst day of his life, Chen Xin Zhong told a State Journal reporter via phone with help from Lan, who served as a translator.

“I beg your forgiveness for the mistake I made because of ignorance, which is the choice I regret most in my entire life,” he wrote in his letter to Zoe.

Calling her by the name they gave her after she was born, Chen Xin Zhong’s letter continued.

“Long Chen, we miss you a lot my daughter. We will always miss you and wait for you. Long Chen, I know you must have been through a lot these years. I’m really, really sorry. Please don’t blame your mom for it. It’s all my fault.”

“It just had to be them,” Zoe said. “Reading the letters, it showed how long they’d been looking for me, and clearly how much pain and regret that they’d been feeling.”

She had no idea how meeting her birth parents would change her life, Zoe said, or how it would impact her adoptive family, but she felt compelled to reach out.

‘I felt that I was like everyone else…’

When Valli and Stephen Halbeisen traveled to China in 1999 to adopt Zoe they knew nothing about her birth parents.

Orphanage officials and employees from the department store where she was found met with them. They were given an album filled with news clippings about her discovery, and photos taken after.

Valli Halbeisen is a retired dance teacher. Stephen Halbeisen spent 22 years with General Motors. They still live in Charlotte and have three other adopted daughters. One was born in China and two were born in Korea.

Zoe was a smart child, Valli said, who did well in school. She never pressed her adoptive parents for more information about her birth family.

“She did not ask about it really,” she said.

Zoe said she thought about it increasingly after she started classes at the University of Michigan.

“Growing up me and my sisters were usually the only Asian people around,” Zoe said. “There weren’t many other Asian people I grew up with, went to school with. I felt that I was like everyone else around me.”

Diversity on the Ann Arbor campus opened her eyes.

That sparked more of a curiosity in me,” Zoe said. “I met people who were from China and went back all the time.”

Zoe said she planned to take a trip there eventually, and visit the department store where her birth parents had left her.

Valli Halbeisen said she was just as skeptical as Zoe when her daughter told her she’d heard from her birth parents.

“We just wanted it all to be good and true, and for nothing about it to be false,” she said.

Valli is still skeptical, but Zoe isn’t.

‘It’s incredible’

Zoe talked to her birth parents for the first time in early April, connecting through Skype.

“We’re all just crying and looking at each other and smiling,” she said. “It was very eye opening. I didn’t realize how much I affected their lives.”

Chen Xin Zhong said he’s thought about Zoe constantly over the last two decades.

“How’s Zoe doing,” he would think. “How’s her life?”

The Skype call was a huge moment for him, he said.

“That’s the most excitement that he had in his life,” Lan said. “He couldn’t say a word.”

Zoe has two biological sisters, Chen Lin and Chen Hong. One is older than Zoe.

“On top of that I have aunts and uncles and grandparents,” she said. “It’s incredible.”

Zoe hopes to meet all of them in late August when she travels to China. Her boyfriend and adopted sister Payton plan to go with her.

“I feel like it’s not going to sink in until I’m sitting on a plane to Shanghai, but I think it’s going to be really surreal just to see these things that have been only in my head, someone else’s life. It will all be in front of me. This is where you were born, these are the steps my parents had to leave me at. It’s kind of crazy.”

Valli Halbeisen said her health won’t allow her to make the trip, but Zoe said she hopes her birth parents can meet her adoptive family eventually.

“It’s not like I have a limited amount of love to give anyone,” she said.

Meeting her birth parents is changing her, Zoe said. She’s still trying to grasp how, but she wanted to share her story. She’s hoping doing it will encourage other Chinese adoptees to seek out their own birth parents.

“I think there’s one thing to take away, and that is relinquishment of a child in China was never black and white,” Zoe said. “We can’t understand the circumstances the families in China had to go through during the one-child policy.””

She thought she was abandoned in China 20 years ago. Then her birth parents found her.
[Lansing State Journal 6/3/19 by Rachel Greco]

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